Mike Annable – groundwater innovator

International groundwater expert Professor Mike Annable has joined forces with the CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country Flagship to develop innovative ways to measure groundwater and pollution fluxes in soil and groundwater environments.

As part of a 12-month sabbatical in Australia supported through CSIRO’s Distinguished Visiting Scientist Scheme, Professor Annable is also investigating cost-effective remedial strategies.

Professor Annable is on secondment from the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences at the University of Florida.

His visit comes at a time when global needs for clean groundwater resources have never been more pressing.

Professor Annable says industrial development is driving the economies of developing nations throughout the world and urban population shifts are having a direct impact on groundwater resources.

Urban planners are not only facing unprecedented challenges in supplying water to burgeoning urban metropolises, but must also manage the quality of limited water resources to ensure that basic health and environmental standards are met.

He says the science of groundwater quality is therefore paramount to underpin successful and sustainable management of this precious resource. Professor Annable is seeking to address this need by developing innovative techniques to measure groundwater and pollution fluxes in soil and groundwater environments.

He is also spearheading an international debate over the possible use of fluxes of contaminants for determining regulatory criteria rather than the current practice of applying concentration-based criteria.

“The mobility of groundwater contamination can be more important than point concentrations”, says Professor Annable. “Understanding where and how a contaminant plume moves may be critical to determining the best strategy for dealing with the contamination and reducing risk.”

With colleagues from the CSIRO Urban Water Environments Stream in Perth, Professor Annable has further developed and trialled innovative instrumentation to measure groundwater and pollution fluxes in soil and groundwater environments.

New projects have been initiated with Rio Tinto, BP and Chevron that will lead to technologies that can further characterise and remediate contaminants in the subsurface.

“We plan to devise and test cost-effective remedial options as well as evaluate the relative success of remediation strategies when implemented,” he says.

Professor Annable was also on the organising committee of the IAHS Groundwater Quality conference hosted by CSIRO in December 2007. He presented a keynote address on the site characterisation challenge of providing adequate data to make site management decisions at acceptable costs.

Contact:
Mike Annable, University of Florida
Email: annable@ufl.edu